Digital cameras, video camcorders, and a wide variety of other consumer devices for image capture and storage are widely available to today's consumers. Consumers who are active in the field of image capture generally accumulate growing archives of images, storing these images either on hard drives in their personal computers (PCs) or on other electronic databases which may be accessible over local or wide area networks (LANs, WANs). Consumers, hereinafter referred to as “editors”, may often wish to build a series of these stored images into a presentation, either for entertainment or more particularly to deliver a particular visual message. Video effects and transitions can be used to enhance the visual impact of such presentations, however first and foremost, the selection and ordering of the images in the presentation must be done in a manner consistent with the goals of the editor.
Stored images may be related to each other in some fashion, for example, by having been captured sequentially in the course of a particular event such as a birthday party. In this event, the time-sequential relationship between the images can often be used as a basis for selecting and ordering the images in the presentation. If, on the other hand, no such inter-image relationship exists, then effective selection and ordering of images can require technical and artistic skills beyond the reach of the typical editor.
A significant amount of value can be added to raw source image material by performing effective post-processing, and ensuring appropriate arrangement of the post-processed images. Sequential image presentations are capable of delivering a wide variety of visual messages, and these can be enhanced by incorporation of video effects and inter-image transitions to increase the visual impact of the presentation.
The presentation of visual images to an audience is an important component of many industries and activities. Accordingly, significant demands are placed upon an “editor” (being a person performing an editing function) of the raw source material, requiring him or her to employ techniques other than mere sequencing of images along a time-line. In order to ensure an effective outcome, it is necessary to select and arrange, in the final production, different types of image from a source image set, and to effectively use video effects and image sequencing techniques.
Professionals who produce image presentations make use of techniques and approaches that are typically complex, and that require a deal of technical, and artistic expertise and experience. This poses a problem for ordinary users of image capture devices and Personal Computers (PCs) who might wish, as editors, to compose image presentations that are pleasing to an audience. Such editors generally do not have the requisite experience and expertise of the professionals in the field, and it is extremely difficult for them to compile effective presentations from the raw source images. The availability of computer-aided image and video editing software provides some assistance to such editors, however significant investment of time and effort is required to use even these tools effectively.